Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category

A few years ago, I built a music portal to experience ExtJS and of cause to create my own music listening experience. It was fun and I have learnt a lot from this exercise from hand craft the app, built script and caching optimization. As always with great power come great responsibility. Due to the size of ExtJS core, the page load is not satisfy by most. However, the site hosted on cheap server and not using any CDN therefore I can’t push it too far.

Moving on, I have done with ExtJS and I know the site works perfectly on desktop platform. However, on mobile it is kind of suck. But well, as a pet project I’m not too worry about that until I’m need to listen to my favorite song on the go then mobile client is needed. So, I decided to built one for myself AGAIN! :D. Yeah, again. Why not after all I’m a craftman I love builting stuffs.

Now here is the plan

I’m going to built mobile client which reuse all functionality from the portal and at the same time extending the functionalities to support offline, favorite & playlist customization or by the way I don’t want to be responsible for username & password so I am going to offload that task to Facebook.

Sound interesting right ;) to make it more interesting I shall say that I have no clue how to built a mobile app at this point. But, let see how long it will take for me to built one :D

Out of my boredom I usually tune in some random Khmer Oldies Songs just to remind myself the glorious era where sound of the music would flew into the deepest of my heart and cheer me up. What I did in the pass was collect all my favorite songs and classified it manually and sometime after clean up my station I let iTune screw up my collection a big pain in the a^^ and as my habit of trying out new os release like Ubuntu every 6 months I got to remind myself backup the music collection before I do something silly. That works out quiet well until I am get lazy and decided not to waste my time move back and force I truth the Internet to play me my favorite songs :) which mean I optimize my money Internet expend when I am not using it for some secrecy works ;)

How it works out for me? YouTube! Yeah, what can’t be find on YouTube right? Except that streaming video on my connection is damn slow and like chopping my head every time the buffer loading. So I tried something lighter pure sound and that tons of site offer free mp3 and I do enjoy using those site which some of you may already know and love. But I am just too demand I want some control over what I want to listen, I want to be able to easily share my playlist with my close friends so they can rejoice in hearing the songs. It turn out that a few site does offer these ability, why am I still not happy? Because the site need to know about me want me to become a member and I kind of like what the f???ck. It like I have to tell my radio who I am before it play me the song kind of thing.

So enough is enough, I thought to myself “look geek if it doesn’t work out, do it yourself” ah huh, that was what I use to talk with my dest friend (sad he’d gone) why don’t we do something about it, It’d be fun. Now that I am bored it justified enough that I block sometime to deliver our plan and so I start prototype the project #sidekick and show it to a few friends get their feedback some -/+ and finally I got it out of the door “JolJET Hits” or should I call it “JolJET Hits Online Music Player” still have an issue of naming it properly but here how it looks:

JolJET Player v2

A typic music player portable as it should be since it developed using HTML 5 and Sencha ExtJS technology blah blah blah not so interesting for an engineer to talk about tools. But hey it’s not bad for the cost of home stay during Khmer New Year instead of enjoying myself sight seeing Thansur Bokor Resort and weeks after to stabilize. But as the passion fill up I glad I spend my time develop this little product so that what I can do now:

On first visit to the site the app will load up default playlist fill with about 250 songs enough if you want to just hear some noise the whole day

If you so obsess about what you want to hear then Clear all and start adding your favorite songs from: a) Library b) Artist Collection or c) Blind search

when you found it select it (multiple select is supported) and click on Add to playlist to append selected song to your current playlist

or if you so want to hear the song immediately just double click it and you got it

Not just that if your like to listen to the music during your work hours (I usually did :D) close your browser as soon as your boss walk to your desk, and revisit the site after he/she gone nice trick yeah ;) who never cheat. But I had implemented is the app will remember not only your selected song but it remember your last play song and resume it for you (Thanks Sothy Chanty for his suggestion)

But how about I want my friend to listen to a song. NO NOT 1 songs my collection, well we got you covered from Now Playing tab you find a menu call Sharing just select your favorite sharing technical twitter/facebook and you done

Recently, I start listen to old Khmer song then I like this song
http://joljet.net/unknown_title.mp3 but damn I don’t remember what the title of this song, and as you know title of oldies song is tricky to guess. So I needed your help do you know what’s the title of the song?